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#218 - Nicholas Binge
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Bestselling speculative sci-fi author, Nicholas Binge is on the podcast chatting about his latest novel, Dissolution as well as his unusual writing process and going from blanket rejections to a five way auction with publishers!
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. love it. Because the writing is sort of everything, right? Like you can fix plot holes, but if the writer is there. So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast. Joining me today is a critically acclaimed best-selling author of speculative fiction, sci-fi and horror. It is Nicholas Binge. Hello. Hi.
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome. Yeah, lovely to be here. um Thanks for coming on. Yeah, and thanks for having me.
Upcoming Novel: Dissolution
00:00:41
Speaker
Kicking things off, by the time this episode goes live, it's not out right now, but when this goes live, your third novel, Dissolution, will be out around the world.
00:00:53
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about it Yeah, so the quick pitch um really is ah that ah our our main character, Maggie Webb, who is this 83-year-old woman, has lived the last decade or so caring for her elderly husband, Stanley.
00:01:09
Speaker
um and And memory loss is gradually a erasing, you know, all the beautiful moments they created together. he She feels like she's losing him. She feels like she's losing the sense of the life they had together. It's... it's it's um you know, her dealing with his dementia and and caring for him is really the loneliest she's ever felt in her life. And it's quite a sad opening in that sense.
00:01:30
Speaker
i But quite quickly, a mysterious stranger ah who calls himself Hassan appears at her door and suggests a...
Genre Blending in Writing
00:01:40
Speaker
surprising secret which is that stanley isn't actually losing his memories someone is actively removing them to hide a long buried secret from coming to light and if maggie does what she's told she might be able to reverse it she might be able to get her husband back and so she's kind of whisked away by this character um and what she's encouraged to do using using these kind of
00:02:06
Speaker
technological marvels that Hassan seems to have access to is to dive into her husband's mind and into his memories, ah which are kind of slowly disappearing um in order to find whatever it is ah that has been hidden and that people are trying to hide.
00:02:23
Speaker
And the plot just kind of spins out from there. i'm not going to say any more because there are twists and spoilers and and not everything happens. is as it seems at the beginning um and not everything that everybody's saying is necessarily what it appears to be.
00:02:38
Speaker
Okay, very cool. You're kind of, you're getting sort of inception vibes. You're kind of teetering the line between this is yeah in theory, scientific, speculative fiction, but also that, you know, anything can happen in one's imagination. So if we're in someone's mind, anything can happen.
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, and that gives you that gives me quite a wide framework to play with kind of weird fiction and horror and things like that in a way that I really enjoy doing. I mean, it's it's it's ostensibly sci-fi um in its concept, but much like my previous books and and anything I write really, it's very, um what you might call genre blending. So it's you know it's sci-fi, it's horror, it's got fantastical elements, it's ideally written with some of the beats of a thriller. Like it's quite pacey. It's high it's it's designed to be quite exciting and twisty.
00:03:32
Speaker
um And I like just kind of bringing all of those together um in a recognizable space. I mean, one of my favorite things to do in novels is start in a... in a recognizable space in a space that the reader can go you know i can i can associate with that i can i can empathize with that you know whether that is the experience of caring for a loved one whether that's uh you know whatever it might happen to be and then just slowly twisting that and changing that and forcing the reader to question every assumption that they had at the beginning of the book as things get weirder and weirder and weirder
00:04:06
Speaker
um it's it's it's a huge amount of fun to write and hopefully a huge amount of fun to read um interestingly you mentioned inception and many people do the minute that i say you know diving into somebody else's mind um but i didn't think i didn't think of inception once when i was writing the book it did for some reason it just didn't occur to me um i was thinking of lots of other comp titles and as soon as i'd finished it and i sent it to um think I said to to my agent and and he was talking about it and he was like, oh, you know, like Inception. And I was like, oh my God, it is just like Inception, isn't it? I had not clocked that.
00:04:40
Speaker
Obviously it's quite it is quite different ultimately, but yeah, it's a funny one. yeah It's like reverse Inception because they're trying to put an idea in where she's trying to get an idea out. Yeah, absolutely. And Inception is dreams, whereas this is memories, and um or certainly that's what it appears to be.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I think part of it was that I was actually writing another book around the time as we were kind of selling this and and getting it ready for publication, um the which which will come out in a year's time. Yeah.
00:05:08
Speaker
the next book, which actually deals head on with the idea of going into people's dreams as opposed to going into people's memories. And so in my head, that book was my kind of inception comp book and not
Discovery Writing Process
00:05:18
Speaker
this one.
00:05:18
Speaker
um ah but But I can definitely see, i mean, even with Ascension before, that the i when people ask me what kind of genre I write, um I usually go in one or two direction one of two directions to explain it to people, either people who don't necessarily read a ah whole load of books that I can give comp titles to or just kind of friends and family.
00:05:41
Speaker
i And the first one is either, um you know, the the really, the messed up, um slightly horrifying episodes of Doctor Who. That's the genre I write in.
00:05:53
Speaker
or um a christopher nolan film um but both of those two kind of that's the kind of space that i'm in okay there's a massive difference in budget between those two but yeah but not in a book that's the beautiful thing i can do anything in a book um and i don't have to worry about budget uh which is beautiful Yeah, that's true.
00:06:13
Speaker
Well, I wanted to ask about, and I feel like I could maybe guess, but I wanted to ask about your writing process because the the stories you you tend to focus on, they are there's usually a sort of an intricate concept at their core.
00:06:28
Speaker
So when you when you're thinking of like a new idea of a new story, um is that the starting point? Do you think of the the interesting kind of concept first and then build everything around that?
00:06:39
Speaker
I think so, yeah. i'm It's hard to say where exactly the inspiration derives from initially. ah but i I tend to think of it like I've always got 10 to 15 different things bubbling around in my head, whether that's an idea for a character, whether that's an idea for a concept, whether that's an idea for a setting. you know i' i I'll have read something or I'll have kind of you know in a newspaper or I'll have noted something or thought about something.
00:07:07
Speaker
And I've gone, oh, that's a cool idea for a book. And I've kind of filed it away at the back of my head, like ah like a pot simmering on the back hob that I'll come back to later. im And then when when novels come about, it's usually a process of there's enough things there that I'm usually going on a walk somewhere or doing something where my brain is free to wonder.
00:07:26
Speaker
And And two or three of those elements will just kind of come together at the same time. And i'll'll I'll see the links between them and I'll go, oh, that's a novel that is. that's ah That concept, that character, that thing, ah that plot twist, whatever it happens to be that I've been thinking about, they'll thou suddenly conflate ah into a single thing.
00:07:45
Speaker
i And I'll know what I want to write. But as far as the writing process goes... im often it'll be a starting point and I won't really know where I'm going. Increasingly now, I'm very much a discovery writer. So I'll kind of I'll start with this, like with a character and a concept and I'll just start writing. And i i really, really won't necessarily know where I'm going to take it. kind of have to trust my, trust my brain and trust my subconscious that I'm eventually going to get somewhere um sensible. What I know I can do is I can continue to kind of keep escalating. I can continue to kind of try and make things a bit weird and turn things on their head and question the assumptions of what's going on.
00:08:27
Speaker
um, But i I don't have a clear end in mind when I start books. um And I don't necessarily know where they're going to end up. That's so interesting. I feel like I'm forever flummoxed in my assumptions about which genres are written in which ways, because I haven't had too many sci-fi sort of speculative fiction writers. And I've had a few, I've had a lot of psychological thriller authors on and in my head, because most psychological thrillers revolve around ah central twist, which kind of um informs the ending
00:09:00
Speaker
I'd always assumed these must be planned and plotted out. But so many of them are discovery writers like yourself. And I would have assumed with the kind of things that you're writing, that they would have been meticulously planned out and you would know exactly what was going to happen step to step. So I'm surprised to find out that you're mostly a discovery writer.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, and it's certainly, you can make it seem like that afterwards. And there are you know, there is a lot of meticulous planning that needs to go into it ah post hoc, I think, ah when you when you go back and kind of make all the pieces work.
00:09:30
Speaker
um Because i like I like to do a lot of playing with structure and structural elements and having them come together in interesting ways. Yeah. But what I do a lot of, which I think I've explained to to other writers sometimes, and and some get it and some really don't get it at all, which just shows how writing process is so different for different people.
00:09:48
Speaker
i' But I do a lot of what I call laying breadcrumbs for my subconscious to play with. So I'll put down things at the beginning of a book where I don't necessarily know what they're there for or why, but something in my head will go...
00:10:05
Speaker
this, this feels right. This seems cool. This seems like something I want to play with. And I often won't work out what I'm going to do with them until, you know, 30,000, 40,000 words later or or more. So for example, um, dissolution opens with a countdown.
00:10:18
Speaker
Um, it's sort one of the first things that you read on the page is, um, 11 hours, zero minutes and zero seconds to dissolution. And this, uh, at the beginning of each alternating yeah a chapter, the countdown kind of starts to count down closer and closer to zero.
00:10:33
Speaker
um When I first wrote that, when I tapped that down on the page, and indeed for the next few chapters as I was writing it, I had absolutely no idea what i was counting down to. I didn't know what dissolution was. i didn't I didn't know why it was there.
00:10:44
Speaker
i But by the end of the book, I'd worked it out. And it just all kind of came together in my head and actually ah provided the ending the that I think worked really well.
00:10:55
Speaker
Oh, that's that's a really cool way of writing. I mean, it obviously, like you say, some people get it, some some people it won't work for everyone. But yeah, like I understand from my own experience and from speaking some people that, you know, a lot of the time...
00:11:10
Speaker
people will go back, writers will go back and add foreshadowing or they'll, though you know, later on in the book, you suddenly, you're writing something and you think, oh, this is perfect. I can tie this back to this thing that happened at the beginning, even though originally hadn't planned that. So you just kind of laying out things where you're like, at some point I might have a, and you know, a light bulb moment and think I can tie this back to that. And it's going to really like tie this whole thing up.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. and and And sometimes it doesn't. And the beauty of it is you can just take it out. I i think of it a little bit like the um the J.J. Abrams approach to storytelling in the first season of Lost, and where he just kind of, it would feel a little bit like all sorts of just ideas would be thrown in as if he just walked into the writer's room one day and gone like let's put a polar bear on the island uh because that's cool uh and that's mysterious um but the difference is that they obviously have to air the seasons as they write and film them so they can't go back when something's not relevant anymore and take it out whereas when i get to the end of the book i can streamline things and i can work out actually what mysterious elements
00:12:16
Speaker
ended up paying off for me and you know, and what didn't, but what I'm giving myself is I'm giving myself ah ah toolkit. I suppose I'm giving myself things to play with down the line. Yeah. How many, like how many of these things do you kind of think you, you roughly get rid of versus keep by the time you've kind of finished the book?
00:12:35
Speaker
I, I, I end up keeping the the high majority of them, 90% at least. Um, I, part of the fun is finding ways to fold them in. I think. Right. Okay. I guess these are not um concepts or ideas that are coming from a void. Obviously, they are you're thinking about the story and they are coming from a sort of an adjacency to the story. So there's a good chance that they will tie in regardless. Absolutely. They're not completely random. they' you know They're thematically relevant or they're relevant to the plot or setting or character to some degree.
00:13:06
Speaker
It's just I don't know exactly what I'm doing with them. And this is, I think, what was talking about when I... was talking about trusting my subconscious a little bit, like they feel right. And that's, that's the only way I can describe it. Really.
00:13:17
Speaker
They feel right for the story at that moment. Even if consciously I can't work out what it is that they're doing. Um, but if I, if I have faith in that instinct, then, you know, 95% of the time I'll work out why,
00:13:31
Speaker
down the line and it might mean that i need to move it around a little bit or move exactly when it's introduced or or how it is that i use it but but most of the time it's something that i can use to pay off something else later okay it sounds like you're very um carte blanche with your redrafting it sounds like you're willing to just totally like flip the whole novel on its head not very precious with your kind of first draft you So you say that, but um I actually, i do i don't I don't do significant amount of um redrafting on ah when I finish the final manuscript. What I do do quite a lot of, and again, some writers do, some writers don't, i is I do quite a lot of editing as I go.
00:14:13
Speaker
So okay ill i I'll kind of write the first chapter and then really kind of edit it and play around with it and fix it and make sure it's going to get into shape before I move on to the second chapter. um And I will continually do... I know some some people sit down and write kind of a whole vomit draft and then go back and have to fix it all up.
00:14:30
Speaker
That really makes me uncomfortable because in my mind, each... you know If I'm thinking about the chronological reader experience of reading a book, each chapter is the foundation upon which the next chapter sits.
00:14:43
Speaker
i ah And all the you know character development, um all of the ah emotions, the relationships, the plot points that happen in the previous chapters inform what you write in the next chapter.
00:14:54
Speaker
So in my mind, if the first chapter or the second chapter is... is a shaky foundation. If I have to go back and change things significantly there, I have to change the whole book um because everything spills out from that.
00:15:05
Speaker
ah So I really spend spend probably more time than a of writers making sure as I go that everything that I write is is in the tightest shape that I want it to be, which usually means actually by the end of the book, I am i don't have to do significant structural edits at all.
00:15:24
Speaker
That's interesting. I feel like you're in quite a rare um ah rare group of of writers that are discovery writer, but not a vomit draft writer. Most of the discovery writers I know, they just get it all out on the page and then they fix the whole thing in the redraft. And basically their vomit draft is just the plan.
00:15:44
Speaker
yeah so that's interesting yeah i i it's yeah it's you're you're right it's different to a lot of people's process i uh i have never really consciously thought about it other than then it's just kind of what's worked for me and then when talking to a lot of other writers been like oh you guys don't write the way i write at all um but that's fine you know everybody's got their own way i mean there have been times so the book that's the book that's coming out next year, and I'm not going to do the title because I don't think we've 100% agreed on it with my publisher, ah but the next novel, um because I've got a never novella coming out in September, the next novel that's coming out after Dissolution, im that was an interesting experience because I did i did everything I just described. I kind of i sat down, i wrote it in the way that I normally write it. I edited it. i got to the end, and I was quite happy with it.
00:16:33
Speaker
But when I sent it off to my agent and and I sent it off to a few kind of trusted ah writer friends to give it a kind of a beta read and give me some feedback on it, I had this really, again, quite instinctive sensation that it wasn't quite there, um that that it wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. And I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I i was i was too close to it. i couldn't work it out. you know I think I was looking at it with too much granularity, looking at the kind of the individual details in the chapters. But there was something that just...
00:17:05
Speaker
I just came out of it going, this is this isn't the best book that it could be. um um There's something fundamental missing and I have no idea what it is. I got some feedback from from different people, but nobody really quite touched on it. So I had to kind of stick it in a drawer for six months while I worked on some other stuff.
00:17:21
Speaker
i And then when I came back to it, i and maybe again, this was I had new ideas that were bubbling around at the back of my brain. I'd read more stuff in the interim. I'd thought about different things.
00:17:34
Speaker
it just, it hit me like an absolute train when I was reading it again. I was like, oh, I completely see what I need to do. And basically I added an entirely new narrative arc. I added this whole frame narrative. I added an entirely new POV character.
Instincts in Manuscript Development
00:17:47
Speaker
ended up adding probably about 30,000 words on top of it. Wow. i That completely changed the structure of the book. i'm But for some reason, I just couldn't see it the first time around. And when I came back to it after six months, it was obvious that that something was missing and I knew what that missing piece was.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was, I might be wrong, but I think it was Zadie Smith who was saying that the best thing you can possibly do for a novel is to write it and then leave it for years if you can, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.
00:18:18
Speaker
So yeah it's definitely something that I think people acknowledge is that if you can not think about something for a long time and detach from it, when you come back to it, you can really do a good job of um fixing it up.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah, if you have the i mean if you have the luxury of doing that with the contract or whatever. but i ah But yeah, there is a definite value to that. And I'm a big believer in, especially if you've written a few books and you've gone kind of gone through that rodeo and you've... you you're you're quite practiced at it and you've read a lot of trusting your authorial instincts and really listening to you know even if you're not entirely sure why if you think something isn't working is probably not working um and you think something is then then hopefully it is i um and so i'm a big believer in that and uh hopefully uh it steers me in the right direction
00:19:08
Speaker
So far so good, right? Seemingly, yeah. So you write, um and we touched on this just earlier with the with the new novel, Disillusion, you write largely in the sort of speculative science fiction space, um yeah less so the magical realism, even though when you're kind of going into someone's head, like we said, with an imagination, you can kind of It's not necessarily magic, but it's like you can get away with doing a lot of things in there.
00:19:34
Speaker
When you're working on ah speculative concept, how important is the plausibility of it? I think it has to feel plausible enough, or I think it has to feel plausible enough within the world with which it exists.
00:19:55
Speaker
And it has it has to feel, the reader has to buy that the characters feel that it's plausible, if that makes sense. which I think is a different thing from the readers thinking that it's a plausible thing that could happen in our world.
00:20:07
Speaker
You know, there's a certain suspension of disbelief that goes on when we read a book, um which I think any reader of speculative fiction allows to some degree. But I am obviously working in a space where I'm kind of pretending it's the real world and then weird stuff is happening in it.
00:20:21
Speaker
i And I think the balancing act is all about... making sure that the characters that are experiencing these things are reacting to them in authentic ways, you know? yeah So if somebody shows up and suddenly says to you,
00:20:35
Speaker
hey, i've got a you know I've got a machine that can you know dive into people's memories ah to me tomorrow in the real world, I'm unlikely to respond and just go, hey, cool, let's do that. you know um I'm going to have more questions and I'm going to be a bit freaked out by it.
00:20:49
Speaker
and And so so I think it's it's more about believable character authenticity than it is strictly about plausibility. And what I've found is that you can... you can Once you have that suspension of disbelief and once you have a reader on board buying, okay, we accept that some weird stuff is happening. We accept that there's a, uh, uh, an authentic sci-fi concept that the characters are brought into.
00:21:13
Speaker
That's when you can start to turn the screws a little bit. And that's when you can start to escalate. And if you are, kind of deft enough with the pacing, you can actually take the book to a very, very, very weird place indeed that would would be probably implausible at the beginning of the book.
00:21:29
Speaker
But the reader can follow you on the journey there um if you do it kind of gradually or not even necessarily gradually, but if you do it at the right pace, I think, essentially. Yes, absolutely. It's about basically getting the reader the reader, or if it's like a film or something, the viewer to buy in.
00:21:45
Speaker
Once they're bought in, you can get away with a lot more. You have a lot more leeway. Absolutely. Yeah.
Character Authenticity in Speculative Fiction
00:21:50
Speaker
And and a good comparison, again, we go back to Inception. When you think about that as a concept, objectively, it's kind of preposterous.
00:21:59
Speaker
The idea of we don't understand dreams really at all as humans, I don't think. Sure. The idea that you could go into someone's dream with like some level of predictability and guarantee that you could influence them when they came out of the dream.
00:22:14
Speaker
is wild, but it works because like you say, and I think you hit the nail on the head with it there is if the characters believe it and the characters are all taking it very seriously, you kind of buy in with the characters.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And and i think I think that relies on having characters that you can empathize with and want to go on that journey with and feel emotionally connected with. i ah but But if that happens, you can kind of did you can take a reader to some quite wild places as long as as long as they're on board with character um ah you know taking it seriously at the same time, for sure.
00:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That being said, um there is a lot of times people do put science fiction and fantasy side by side.
Transition from Fantasy to Speculative Fiction
00:22:57
Speaker
That's why they're often referred to together as SFF.
00:23:00
Speaker
Is fantasy something that you'd ever be interested in writing? It's a good question. i The first novel I ever wrote actually was a proper second world fantasy novel. ah You know, swords and magic and all of that kind of stuff. um And it was terrible.
00:23:15
Speaker
i um But it was an interesting experience. I mean, I look back at my inspirations. Yeah. just in life generally, and um what i read when I was younger and what I got passionate about. um You know, things like Lord of the Rings really got me into fantasy when I was a kid, and I ended up reading a lot of fantasy around that time. But at the same time, my dad was kind of feeding me a steady diet of golden age science fiction. So like Asimov and Clark, and then people like Philip K. Dick and things like that.
00:23:43
Speaker
So I kind of had both at the same time. Yeah. I probably lent more towards the SF as I got older. and then And then when I was an adult, I was reading just a wide range of things, thrillers, literary fiction, you know different types of speculative fiction, all sorts of things. I got very interested in kind of books that played experimentally with structure and things like that.
00:24:04
Speaker
But then when I finally decided to write a novel, when I must've been kind of mid twenties or something, i i think I think there was just something comforting about the idea of writing in a fantasy world because it really called back to like staying up late at night when I was 11 years old and being lost in kind of some kind of fantasy trilogy.
00:24:21
Speaker
i And so that's where I naturally gravitated. and I did that. And when I got to the end of it, And again, there was ah I was quite happy with myself. I thought it was quite good. It wasn't, but you know from the perspective of the time, I thought it was. i And then i wrote and i wrote another book after that, so I wrote a couple of books. um And that was a fantasy book as well, but maybe a little bit more kind of weird ah with the structure and kind of some more sci-fi elements.
00:24:47
Speaker
And neither of them really went anywhere, partly because they weren't very good. And I i had a moment where I kind of reflected and went, well, what... why is this not working for me?
00:24:59
Speaker
Um, is it because I'm not good enough writer? it Is it because I'm writing the wrong thing? Um, and I really thought, well, what do I read now? What are I actually passionate about now? What are really interested in? and And at the time I i actually didn't read a huge amount of fantasy anymore.
00:25:12
Speaker
Um, and I think I'd just gone to that comfortable place because it felt familiar. And what I needed to do was to push myself out of my comfort zone and and write some things that I felt were ah maybe a little bit more exciting for me and a little bit more,
00:25:26
Speaker
i a a little bit more pushing the boundaries which is what i started to do which is when i wrote professor everywhere which is my first novel which is very kind of experimental and it's got these kind of footnotes and it's a kind of a fictional memoir told um after a fictional event that's that's framed like it's happened in the real world and all of these other kinds of things um and when i started doing that i think that's when it really clicked and i went oh this is the kind of stuff I want to be writing. i want I want to be able to break free of the boundaries of genre a little bit and really get weird with it and really play with structure and reader experience and at time and all of these different things um in a way that the strictures of a traditional fantasy i genre and narrative just didn't allow me to do.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I've had so many authors on who, when they talk about the sort of the first novel that they had written, or like maybe the first few novels they'd written, it took them while to realize that they were not writing in the genre that they would really excel at.
00:26:38
Speaker
And it's often because but a lot of the time authors don't write in the genre that they read in and they, your first instinct is to write what you read, but that's not necessarily what's going to work for you as a writer.
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think i think um it's not it's not necessarily what but excites you. and And I think the process of writing and reading are two similar but fundamentally different processes.
00:27:04
Speaker
um And the think some of the things that I absolutely love reading, i would not want to write and probably wouldn't really be able to write very well at all. and But I do think that the stuff that I write still sits within that wheel of stuff that I enjoy to read as well.
00:27:21
Speaker
um So I think i thinkt one is broader than the other, perhaps. so Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. It's about finding finding what works for you. like Like with all these things, the whole process is about figuring out what works for you as an individual, because it it won't be the same as anyone else who's writing.
Personal Writing Process and Advice
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Which is why I bounce off so much, um so much and ah kind of didactic writing advice that that you come across, whether that's in craft books or I've not really met read many ah slash any craft books properly.
00:27:52
Speaker
Uh, but, um, uh, but you'd see it kind of spouted online and things like that of, you know, this is the way to write or have a process or whatever it happens to be. And I just think this, there is, there is no way to write the number of writers that I've spoken to over the course of, uh, my career thus far that all write in wildly different ways. Um, I think it's just, it's just wonderful. And it's just about finding your own, your own process that works.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. um We're at the point in the episode where i ship you off and ask you, Nick, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
00:28:31
Speaker
So I've been thinking about this question because I was slightly prepped for it. i And I had lots of different thoughts going on in my mind of whether I wanted something comforting or whether I wanted something, you know, that was big and long that I could kind of spend a long time with. um i played around with the idea of House of Leaves by Danielewski because I think there's so much, it's such a maximalist book. There's so much more to find in that book.
00:28:57
Speaker
um but then decided that i'm not sure that the one book i wanted was horror on
Desert Island Book Choice
00:29:01
Speaker
a desert island um in the end um so uh i've decided ah that i'm going to cheat slightly um and i'm going to pick uh the earth sea quartet which is technically four books but i have a published version of it all bound together as one book in my house so yeah i'm gonna count i can take that right Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, people have, I've been sent, someone sent me a bound copy of all three Lord of the Rings books to prove that it could be bound. You can definitely bind the Earthsea books. They're much smaller.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Fantastic. right. I'm binding the Earthsea books. I'll bind in the, I'll bind in the, the, ah bind in the the The last one, The Other Wind as well. Why not? ah It's quite short. it's the Earthsea books I'm taking with me ah because i I think they're just so special. They hold a very special place in my heart. I could reread them and I have reread them again and again and again.
00:30:00
Speaker
i And I think on a desert island they would provide me with... a bit of magic and escapism. But I also think that Le Guin's turn of phrase and expression and characters are constantly shifting under my fingertips. And I'm constantly finding something new that speaks to something deep in my soul.
00:30:21
Speaker
And I think it would be a wonderful thing and companion to have with me when I was stuck on my own. Yes, I can only I look at Ursula Le Guin just with awe when I think about novels and things like that. She's an absolute goddess of writing. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
00:30:39
Speaker
And decades ahead of her time. Like I read Left Hand of Darkness a few years ago for the first time, and I couldn't believe that this wasn't a novel that had come out like recently because it's so topical.
00:30:52
Speaker
Yeah. And I read, I read, you know, whether it's her fiction, again, fantasy, sci fi speculative fiction, and ah which she does fantastically and topical and decades ahead of her time, or, you know, you read essays that she wrote 30, 40 years ago. And I just think that's just so incisive.
00:31:08
Speaker
um And so keenly observed about humanity and society. im Yeah, she's just an amazing writer and amazing woman.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. um So in the next half of this chat, I'd like to get into a bit more of Nick's writing journey going back to when he first got his foot in the door of publishing.
00:31:30
Speaker
um That discussion will all be available on patreon.com slash right and wrong. um because that is how you get ideas it is the act of writing that gives you ideas and that brings inspiration along um and so if you want to if you want to write something good you need to just sit down and write yeah that i mean that that's great advice and and it's and and it's a great quote and a great way to to round off the episode so thank you so much um nick for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your latest novel dissolution which is going to be out right now as it as of this airing and everything else that you've been up to it's been really cool chatting with you
00:32:05
Speaker
Thank you so much, Jamie. It's been lovely being on. Thanks for having me. And for anyone wanting to keep up with what Nick is doing, you can find him on Blue Sky at Binge Writing, or you can head over to his website, nicholasbinge.com.
00:32:18
Speaker
To support the podcast, like, follow and subscribe. Join the Patreon for ad-free extended episodes and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes. Thanks again to Nick and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you on the next episode.